Laura Restrepo - Delirium

The picture was really incredible, Pablo Escobar, the most wanted man in history, in a white shirt and with his face bare, no dark glasses or cap or fake beard or plastic surgery, just standing there, as he is, leaning like any tourist against the railing around the White House, which you could see behind him with its Greek columns and the triangular pediment of its north face, so as I looked at that picture, Agustina angel, I said, Unbelievable, Don Pablo, President Reagan is looking for you everywhere and there you are right at his front gate, and he replied, Reagan’s problem, Midas my friend, is that he’s the one behind bars.

And yet things had changed for Pablo since that carefree afternoon in the capital of the empire, because in this dark, empty place that was his hideout he didn’t strike me as his usual self; there was even one silly detail that made me think the end might be near for him, and it was a cardboard box holding the remains of some fried fish he’d been eating, I’m sure one of the gunmen guarding him had bought it for him at some stall, which was fine, but what I couldn’t understand, Agustina princess, was why Pablo hadn’t ordered for those cold, greasy leftovers to be taken away. I don’t know if you follow me, it was nothing, really, just the sort of thing I always notice, carelessness that I tend to interpret as a sign of decline.

Pablo doesn’t waste time, he gets straight to the point, so in twenty minutes we had settled the four business matters on the table and then he went on to question me about what has always been his great concern: he wanted to know what was being hatched in Bogotá with regard to the Extradition Treaty that would surrender drug traffickers to the United States, and when I told him it was almost certain that Congress would enforce it, I saw him tremble with righteous fury and heard him speak a momentous sentence, the same sentence that later echoed in my memory when the bomb exploded at L’Esplanade, and take careful note, Agustina princess, because what he said was the historic proclamation of his vengeance: I’m going to spend my fortune making this country weep. Do you realize what that means, doll?

Since Pablo is a phoenix and has the nine lives of a cat, he had soon overcome the difficulties he was in at the time of our second meeting and was the master of the universe again, and there were more samba dancers and armies of hired assassins and bloodbaths all over the nation, and meetings with ex-presidents of the Republic and giraffes and airplanes and Olympic-size pools, and so two years had gone by since I’d heard him utter his threat, and then the other night, when the bomb went off at L’Esplanade, I remembered it and thought: The time has come, goddamn it. I’m going to spend my fortune making this country weep, that’s what Pablo said to me, Agustina darling, and his fortune must be the biggest in the world, so if the man manages to squeeze one tear from us for each dollar he’s got, think how much crying we still have left to do.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you saw your sister, Eugenia, I ask Aunt Sofi, a more or less routine question with no notion of the kind of answer it will elicit, The last time? Why it was the day of the final judgment, the day the family was destroyed, What are you talking about, Aunt Sofi, About precisely that, Aguilar, about the day the family became simply a memory, and a bitter memory at that, I’m talking about a Palm Sunday thirteen years ago, A Sunday, I say, why is it that everything has to happen to us on Sunday?

Agustina was seventeen and finishing high school that year, Aunt Sofi tells me, and Joaco, who was twenty, was already in college, and Bichi had turned fifteen but he was still a child, though he was very tall, probably already as tall as he is now, which is six foot two, but he was childish and shy, too, a boy with few friends, desperately attached to home and especially to Agustina. It was six thirty in the evening, says Aunt Sofi, when it happened. Like every Sunday when they were at their house in La Cabrera, lunch consisted of banana — passion fruit sorbet, a proper chicken-and-potato ajiaco soup, and custard for dessert, and at three o’clock everyone was home, a fairly unusual occurrence, Joaco in tennis shoes and white shorts because he’d spent the morning playing sports at the club and the other two children, Agustina and Bichi, still in their pajamas, because on Sundays Carlos Vicente Senior made the special concession of allowing them to come to the table like that. My sister, Eugenia, and I had taken palm branches to be blessed at the twelve o’clock service at Santa María de Ángeles and on the way home we stopped at a little street market to buy avocados for the ajiaco , and since it was a beautiful afternoon we sat for a while in the sun on a low wall, although the real reason we sat there was because my sister, Eugenia, had broken a shoe strap, isn’t life incredible, Aguilar, if she hadn’t broken that strap we probably wouldn’t have started to talk, which we almost never did although we’d lived together all our lives except for a few brief intervals.

Do you remember what you talked about? I ask, Yes, of course I remember, it began with the strap, the two of us discussing how the shoe could be fixed, Tomorrow, if you want, on the way to the Areneras clinic I can leave it at a shoe-repair place for you, I’ll take in the pair so that both can be reheeled, that’s what I said to my sister, Eugenia, At the time, Aunt Sofi says, I’d been working for several years as a volunteer nurse at a clinic for the children of the workers in the sand pits north of the city, and though I don’t recall what paths our conversation took, we ended up talking about Sasaima, a subject that we usually avoided because of the many unspoken things that had happened there, but that day, as luck would have it, we wound up discussing the eternal mystery of Farax’s passage through our childhood, Farax? I ask, it sounds like a dog’s name, No, Aunt Sofi answers, he was a handsome blond boy, a piano student, his name was Abelito Caballero but we called him Farax, Where did the nickname come from, I ask. That I couldn’t tell you, nicknames are like sayings, you never know who came up with them. Anyway, that afternoon, for the first time in our lives, Eugenia and I began to approach the edges of the mysterious chasm of Farax’s stay in the house where we grew up, the brutal way things changed between my parents from the time Farax first appeared.

Eugenia and I were coming closer and closer to the heart of the matter, Aunt Sofi says, and it was I who adjourned the meeting, reminding her of the ajiaco , I who prevented us from going any further, Maybe you were afraid, I say, Yes, I might have been, maybe I believed that all secrets are kept in the same box, a single box of secrets, and that if you reveal one you risk exposing all the rest, And you were keeping a big secret from your sister, I say, Yes, well, I already confessed that to you, Aguilar, let’s not go over that again, All right, I agree, but tell me more about your conversation after the Palm Sunday service. Let’s go, Sofi said to Eugenia, your husband and children must be hungry, and Eugenia smiled — sadly, I think now — You’ve been living with us for how many years, she said to Sofi, and you always say it that way, your husband and your children, I wonder whether I’ll ever hear you say my brother-in-law and my nieces and nephews, and it was precisely because of words like these, which stung me so, that I always avoided conversations with my sister, Aunt Sofi says to me and then confesses that she was afraid of what might happen, On the one hand I felt the urge to reveal everything to Eugenia and beg her forgiveness a thousand times over, a forgiveness I knew that she could never give, but on the other hand some part of me rebelled and I felt a terrible urge to say to her face, My husband and my children, Eugenia, my husband and my children, because they’re more mine than they are yours, but the conversation took another turn and nothing more was said about Farax or the other, even pricklier, matter; it was left at that because they never had a chance to speak of it again.